The Whitcher Cemetery dates back to 1875. It's located in the East Garrison section of the former Fort Ord, in Central California. Currently the cemetery is not open to the public due to land development.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

AND IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER!

I’m so angry I could spit (if I had any saliva, that is).
After BookPros, the company I choose to publish my book,
went bankrupt, I thought my self-publishing horror story had at last died.

I was wrong.

It just keeps getting better all the time. BookPros had a distribution company called Midpoint, who keeps authors’ books in
various warehouses across the United States. During the bankruptcy, Midpoint asked me what I wanted to do
with my books. Basically, the options were three: send them to another
distributor, to another warehouse, or back to me. As difficult as it was to
decide on a fourth option, to destroy them, I chose to do that because the cost
of shipping boxes of books isn’t cheap (not to mention the storage nightmare).
Still, it felt like condemning my first born child to death. I lowered the boom and thought that would be
the end of that story.

I was wrong again.

Recently, I’d begun putting up some of my short stories as E-books,
and also my revised first novel, East
Garrison, (to include photographs, illustrations, and new text about
mountain lions). While checking for my new cover I ran across Midpoint’s website. Guess what? They
had East Garrison for sale. And yes,
this is the book I condemned to capital punishment—all East Garrison books at Midpoint
were supposed to have been destroyed.

But I was wrong yet again.

Some East Garrison
books are in Midpoint’s Kansas
warehouse, some are in another warehouse in Little Rock. It has been over two
years since I terminated my contract with BookPros (August 13, 2010).
Sometime around the beginning of the year 2012 they filed for bankruptcy. Over
two years have passed from the time when I gave the execution order for my baby.
My innards twisted and I doubled over in pain. I felt the cloud of misery that
had been my daily experience for too many years return.

There are no words to describe, to truly make clear the
horrible feeling of a writer being ripped off and betrayed by a publisher. Publishers
like BookProsare truly evil. They’re the snake-oil
salespeople of our time, without morals and accountability. That’s also true
about so-called distributors like Midpoint.

So, calling all authors who published their book(s) through BookPros and distributed through Midpoint! Your baby (ies) are likely still up for sale, and you’ll
never see a penny. In fact, you’ll probably get a bill for storage. How’s that
for another slap in the face of people whose only dream is to be an author?

For the actual names of the people involved in this money-making scheme, leave a comment, and I'll be more than pleased to comply.

G.M. Weger (see cover photo for comparison)

Contact information

Foggy East Garrison

A 'Planet Ord' kind of day

The mist at East Garrison or anywhere on the sand hills of Fort Ord is haunting. It inspired me to write a story to memorialize, in a sense, the loss of the army base, and also to tell a cautionary tale rich in plot and characters. The result will be out this year. I hope readers will enjoy it.G.M. Weger